The Religion nightclub in Wakefield has caused anger with nights including Resurrection and Salvation. Picture: Jonathan Gawthorpe

Published on Saturday 30 July 2011 09:06

A NIGHTCLUB has been criticised by Christian leaders after it was controversially named Religion, with club nights called Resurrection and Salvation.

The Wakefield club also sells cocktails with names including Angel Wings.

The club Religion opened its doors just a week ago but residents and local clergy have already shown their outrage at the decision to introduce themed nights called Monday Mass and Friday Salvation.

Critics claim that there would be a widespread outcry if Muslim worship terms had been used to promote drinking and dancing.

Angered residents say that the owners of the club are being disrespectful and insensitive to the Church and the Bishop of Wakefield, Stephen Platten, has deemed the club’s themes “inappropriate”.

He said he was not against people enjoying themselves but he said he did think it was insensitive, adding: “There’s a whole host of topics they could have chosen.

“Some of the names of the events are insensitive and inappropriate.

“Religion is about taking life seriously. Would people have been amused if they’d called it health, which is an equally serious topic, and named some of the rooms A&E and gynaecology?”

Bishop Platten added: “If any other aspect of people’s lives was taken and trivialised in this way I think people would be upset.

“In particular, in this case, it affects Christian people.”

The Dean of Wakefield, Jonathan Greener, added yesterday: “I think it’s being rather insensitive to Christians.

“The names it has chosen refer to ideas and activities that hold deep meaning for Christian people, and the way the new club is using them could be seen to be sending them up.

“On the other hand, it could be argued that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if people want to experience the real thing, they are always most welcome at the cathedral.”

Wakefield city centre police inspector Richard Close said no offences had been committed.

He said: “Parliament passed legislation under section 17 of the Public Order Act aimed at outlawing crime where the offender is motivated by hostility or hatred towards the victims race or religious beliefs.

“In my opinion and experience the management of the premises are neither showing hatred or hostility, they are without doubt utilising words from the Bible to further their business interest, which in the eyes of some may be distasteful.”

The company which owns the club, Leisure 99, said the name of the club nights were not linked to any particular faith.

In a statement, a company spokesman said: “The definition of the word religion is a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion, which is what partygoers in the city are doing.

“We chose the term Resurrection for a Friday night, because the night-time economy’s suffering and we’re hoping to revive and revitalise it, as its definition suggests.

“The same is true of Salvation, and the word Mass was chosen because it’s a massive Monday night of massive music.”

Wakefield poet Louis Kasatkin, who helps forges links between the arts and the church, said it was easy to imagine the reaction if the club’s operators had used Muslim terms of worship.

“But they appear to think using Christian theme terminology is okay.

“My own view is that it is tantamount to breaching the law on religious hatred,” he added.

Other political activists asserted the rights of free speech on both sides.

Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance, claimed that the owners of the club might be living under police protection had they been promoting club nights called Jihad or Ramadan.

Dr Gabb suggested that Christians who are offended by what is offered should find out who is providing goods and services to the club, and publicly refuse to do business with them.

However, he said the name of a club should not be a matter for the criminal law.

The right of these people to commit blasphemy,” he said, “rests on the same grounds as a Christian’s right to profess his faith.”

Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance, on BBC Radio Leeds, on Friday the 29th July 2011, to discuss the boundary between blasphemy and freedom of speech. His own contributions starts around 8’50”.

The background story is that a nightclub in Wakefield is offering “Crucifixion” and “Resurrection” nights. Sean Gabb agrees that this is blasphemy in the sense that it seems calculated to bring the Christian Faith into ridicule and contempt. He also notes that, if they had offered “Jihad” and “Ramadan” nights, the owners on the nightclub would already be living under police protection.

Dr Gabb suggests that Christians who are offended by what is offered should find out who is providing goods and services to this club, and publicly refuse to do business with these providers. However, he also says that this should not be a matter for the criminal law. “The right of these people to commit blasphemy,” he says, “rests on the same grounds as a Christian’s right to profess his faith.” Moreover, we live in a country where the ruling class is increasingly hostile to Christianity. Any law demanded by Christians will be written and passed and enforced by people who are unknown and unaccountable, and who are probably not Chistians. Such a law will be used to discriminate still further against Christians.

What is liberty for, and why should people be free?

David Davis

Merry Christmas, ladies and gentlemen. May God rest you merry, and perhaps tight this year. Get tight while you can still afford it – for governments, specially this one, would like to think they can “combat drinking” by over-taxation, freely and cheerfully admitted to.

Well, this year, among other things, the awful and totally-unelected Gordon Brown zeppelin-thing-in-the-ether, foisted on us by Tony Blair and possibly his worst single act, imploded finally. We voted, and guess what? Nobody won, and the Government got in, again. This may be a good thing in the short term, in that the coalition can’t actually do anything to hinder people much more, let alone help. But strategically in the battle for universal individual freedom, we here are certainly no better off than before.

In fact, a little worse, for some of us like me and Sean see the Clock ticking…. We know that however relatively more slowly than before we are being marched to the living-gas-chambers of sustainable socialist greenery, and to the concentration-camps of more intricate and closer repression, the available decades of living people’s lifetimes in which they might do something to reverse The Big Modern Managerial State, are slipping away like sand in a glass. Time, literally, is running out for liberty in the UK for sure, and so it would seem also for other Anglosphere nations. I gather that you can get fined for speeding in Australia, if you are tracked by a police helicopter…I thought helicopters were foreign-policy-war-winning-weapons, for machine-gunning GramscoStaliNazi “freedom-fighters”, until I researched Australian Policing.

So, what’s wrong with liberty? Why exactly are we under assault? And given the seeming consensus ranged against individual freedom Continue reading →

Around the world, from the North Atlantic to Anatolia, political and economic instability have stimulated a reassessment of the requirements of constitutional government. In what seems to be an acknowledgment of the new realities of the Information Age, the political class has stressed popular involvement in the drafting process, a “participatory” approach to overhauling the foundations of the legal framework. “Iceland,” reports the Washington Post, “is trying to do just that, by crowdsourcing its new constitution to its citizens through social media.” Cries for popular participation are no less vociferous in Turkey, where—in the wake of the Arab Spring—a recent election has prompted calls for a completely new constitution. Opening the process of shaping the law to the body politic is an important step in the right direction, but it need not stop at merely tweaking a constitution. In fact, the practical benefits of popular participation in shaping the contours of the law suggest that a single starting point for law, a static authority like a written constitution, is neither necessary nor desirable. The useful insight embedded in the “crowdsourcing” approach to constitutional government is its implicit rejection of a top-down blueprint for the law. Whether its advocates realize it or not, Friedrich Hayek’s concept of “spontaneous order” is the core of the participatory model. What’s more, the logic of that concept requires us to go well beyond just the replacement of a constitution; it insists on the replacement of the state itself. Continue reading →

Through the mid-fifteenth century, access to land in the typical English village was regulated on the so-called “open-field” model. The village lands were the common property of the peasant communes, and occupancy right to arable land was periodically redivided between families, with each family receiving a number of strips in each field proportionate to its size. Access rights to pasture and woodlot were similarly assigned by family. This family patrimony in access to the land was a permanent source of economic security. What’s more, the ability to build a cottage on the border of the uncultivated waste, or a marsh, was a way of insuring minimum subsistence for the landless and land-poor peasantry.

Beginning in the Tudor period, the landed classes of England enclosed a growing portion of the arable land for sheep pasturage, essentially robbing the peasantry of its traditional property rights in the land — established by the venerable title of cultivation for time out of mind — by brute force. Henries VII and VIII seized the land of the Church and the monasteries and gave them away to royal favorites, who disregarded the peasants’ customary rights and either evicting them to enclose more pasture or rack-tenting them. By the eighteenth century, probably half the arable land in England’s open fields had been stolen in this manner. The process continued in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this time under the so-called Parliamentary “Acts of Enclosure.” Arable land, but even more so common pasture and waste, were enclosed as fee-simple property. Although in legal theory the peasants were compensated for their share in the common with fee-simple rights to a share of enclosed land, in practice most claims by customary right weren’t recognized under royal law. Continue reading →

In the Usambara Mountains in the northeast of the Tanzania there is a small shack next to huge building covered in makuti thatch. There is a horrendous noise of keyboards clattering away with undying creativity. On entry to the facility you will see thousands and thousands of baboons hard at work revising Shakespeare for our Farsi readership. The head simian assures us that the latest euro forecasts are not good, it just come over the wire that our deadly competitors, the handy chimpanzees in Zimbabwe are ahead of us on their predictions for European disaster. This particular bunch of chimps, after entertaining one Jane Goodall for many years decided that now she has a PhD, it would be a good idea if some of them went south for commercial reasons to Zimbabwe, regrettably it turned out that human beings in that state had completely and utterly lost their senses and divested their currency of any monetary value whatsoever. This has long been understood in simian circles that both white and black varieties of human beings were involved in the independence negotiations leading to a government incapable of understanding why hyperinflation happens.

We had of course heard from our cousins in the Berlin Zoo that the Germans had previously engineered a similar debacle way back in the 1920s and the amazing thing is how so little those self-important human economists and leftists managed to learn. It was thought that too much beer and sausages was perhaps the underlying cause, though that theory was never proven.

One of the great details in the life of baboons is their undying commitment to accurate grammatical differences about the nuances of middle English, besides that talent, they have a deep reservoir of commercial intelligence about the euro, so much so that they are given to use four words, the first one being “get” the second one being the definite article “the” and the third being something about going forth and multiplying in Anglo-Saxon then followed by “out”. This is the simian message about the euro. You heard it here. The head simian was asked what should we do, Bitcoin.com was scrawled on a piece of paper and thrust towards us. At that point we were shown the door and given a bag of bananas and told to enjoy our flight back to civilization at the Regent’s Park zoo.

Note by Sean GabbI have copied this in full from The Occidental Observer site because Professor MacDonald’s posting seems to be the longest and most thorough analysis of what drove Mr Breivik to commit his crimes – always assuming he did indeed commit them. He has actually read the killer’s book, and this lets him say a great deal more than the mainstream media, which appears to take its entire coverage from statements by the Norwegian police.

For the record, the Libertarian Alliance deplores these killings and has no sympathy whatever with the ideology that may have been used to justify them. Nor do we endorse any claim that Professor MacDonald may derive from his analysis. At the same time, we thank him for having read and summarised an 1100 page book that has been made important by the the alleged deeds of its author.

It should go without further elaboration that we oppose all demands for gun control, which is nothing more than victim disarmament, and we oppose all demands for censorship of supposedly “hateful” ideas. Here begins the analysis by Kevin MacDonald:-Continue reading →